Trend Micro and CSIS have released a joint white paper about the Tinba information-stealing malware. The paper contains a thorough technical analysis of the malware itself, as well as the architecture of its infrastructure, and its ties to other illegal activities.

What is Tinba?

Tinba got its name from its extraordinarily small size – its code is approximately 20 kilobytes in size, a remarkably small number for banking malware. Tinba is a combination of the words tiny and banker; the same malware is also known as Tinybanker and Zusy.

Tinba is delivered onto user systems via the Blackhole exploit kit, and is aimed primarily at users in Turkey. We estimate that there are more than 60,000 users affected by Tinba in Turkey.

The capabilities of this malware are broadly similar to other similarly sophisticated info-stealing malware families. Using web injects, it steals the login information from websites, particularly those located in Turkey. Some targets such as Facebook, GMX, Google, and Microsoft are hardcoded into the code of Tinba itself and are universally targeted by Tinba. Other institutions are targeted based on downloaded configuration files; frequent targets include key government portals and Turkish banks/financial institutions.

Tinba’s Infrastructure

The researchers looked into the command-and-control infrastructure of the Tinba samples to gather more information about this particular attack. By examining information from WHOIS and DNS records, as well as site hosting information, they found that:

Tinba is linked to other activities such as money mules, shady Web hosting, pornographic sites, and other information-stealing malware.

Tinba’s infrastructure is located in Russia and Lithuania;

The scale of the connections suggests that this was not the work of one or two individuals, but instead a large, well-organized gang.

The full details of our findings are contained in our paper The Turkish Incident, which we encourage everyone to read. You can also read CSIS’s blog on this paper over on their site.